The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange

by Anna Ferrara

  I knew then I had enough of blacking out and being toyed with by Wonderdrug Laboratories. I knew then I had to get Paul out of there, as I promised, even though she would no longer be able to see it happen. I got onto my knees and pushed myself into a standing position, even though my back felt as if it were on fire and my head was starting to spin.

  When I did manage to steady myself on two feet and look the offensive trooper in the eye, all I could see was the stupefaction on his face. He kept staring at my back so I turned and looked and that was when I realised my back was so thoroughly covered in bullet holes, it had the texture of a blood-filled honey comb.

  Yet, it did look somewhat beautiful, in its own magical little way, even though it burned and seemed congested with objects that didn’t quite belong. I took a deep breath, squeezed my back hard and felt much better the moment a multitude of bullets dislodged themselves from my flesh and spattered onto the floor like rain, making little clanking sounds as they hit the hard concrete floor.

  The trooper’s mouth fell open and he began to back away with the dagger firmly held between us.

  Watching him react that way made me finally realise who I really was and what I was really capable of. Despite everything I failed to achieve in life, I was most definitely not a nobody indeed. Nor was I crazy. I was just more unique than most people could ever imagine possible!

  I grabbed the rifle Paul had dropped and aimed it at the trooper who quickly dropped his dagger so that he could lift his rifle towards me instead. I fired a few times but couldn’t get him, so I moved closer. As I marched forward, he shot me nine times in total. Six times in the legs, twice in the chest and once in the head but I never stopped moving.

  I shot him point blank with a single bullet the moment I got close enough. He was down on the ground and dead less than a minute later. I, although awash with new pains, remained standing. My neck no longer bled either.

  Once I realised that could happen, I became unstoppable.

  With the rifle firmly in my hands, I joined the odd-coloured woman in her fight and downed every single one of the troopers I came across. They shot at me as I walked through them, possibly over a hundred bullets collectively, but I never once stopped marching forward and shooting them in the face.

  I no longer cared that I was killing people because I could tell—from their faces and the way they ran bullets through me like I were a paper target—how much they wanted to kill me. I no longer cared if they were fathers or sons or mere wage slaves like I once was because I could tell—from the way they lunged towards me and tried to strangle me or saw my head off—that they saw me as nothing but a specimen to be acquired. I could see I was never going to get to be free if I didn’t fight my hardest for it.

  That day, the day Paul died in my arms, I ended the lives of more than ten perfect strangers and became a whole new person.

  Chapter 33

  The Morning After

  I watched it all happen this time; saw the polka dots of blood all over my body change in size and texture while lying at the back of a car with the world going by and sunlight in my eyes.

  It wasn’t pleasant. There were horrific pulling sensations and lots of pain at first—excruciating, wholly absorbing pain in my back, legs, arms and head. Every breath became a shot of agony. Every thought, equally so. At points, I considered willing myself to black out but each time, I found myself deciding otherwise. I had to see all this for myself, I knew. I had to know what my own body could really do.

  It was surreal. My wounds were different each time I looked. Deep holes of fresh blood metamorphosed into crusty, dark brown scabs within two hours. By the end of the third hour, the scabs were dropping off like leaves of a tree in autumn, revealing the brownish, discoloured blotches underneath. By the end of the fourth hour, the brownish blotches had already faded into nonexistence.

  I sat up on the damp, blood-stained car seat when those strange pains desisted and my skin looked almost as good as normal. The song playing on the radio in that moment was something old and slow, something I remembered having heard once or twice when just a child, constructed from electric notes, drums and lamentations of a saxophone. The pensive male singer sang about some playground love in time with the passing world outside the car window.

  In the driver’s seat, the odd-coloured woman sang along. She had shades on and gloves over her hands and she knew every word. She sang like she meant every phrase too.

  I scooted forward and put my head between the two front seats. “Are you real?” I asked her.

  She turned her greenish-blueish-greyish head to glance at me and smiled. “After all that happened, can’t you tell?” Her voice was gentle. Patient. As if she understood perfectly why my mind would be, in spite of everything in front of me, full of doubt.

  “Just double-checking. And triple-checking. Just in case.”

  She nodded, I think, as she bobbed her head to the beat of the song she seemed to enjoy very much. “I’m real. You’re real. Your friend was real too.”

  Paul. In the boot, covered in ice, just an inanimate object I couldn’t bear to get rid of now. A lump snowballed in my throat and the world around me turned into a blur. I couldn’t help but think Paul was truly my playground love and yet... “I fucked everything up big time, didn’t I?”

  The odd-coloured woman glanced at me through the rear view mirror and shrugged. “We all do. At first. That’s how we learn. Lucky for you, we have the option of getting your friend back, if that’s what you want.”

  “How?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I frowned and it made fat, heavy drops of tears roll down my cheeks.

  My world became distinct again. The interior of the car looked cheap and was full of specks of dirt and scratches as rented cars usually were. The windshield ahead was full of water stains and mud. I looked out the side window and saw trees and endless roads and not many signs of human life. It looked like spring.

  New York was nowhere in sight. None of Wonderdrug Laboratories’ services or products were anywhere in sight.

  That was a relief. I had no idea where we were headed but then, it no longer mattered, did it? The old me was gone. My old life was gone. I could start again anywhere, and this time, with full knowledge of what I really could do. Knowing that made me feel a tad hopeful.

  The odd-coloured woman hummed the chorus of the song as if driving around with a dead body in the boot was nothing to be bothered by. Her calm, and maybe the calm of the human-less world outside, infected me. I felt myself sink back into the car seat and loosen up despite knowing how wrong it was for me to do so after having only just killed people.

  “Can we talk about who pushed me now?” I asked at some point.

  “What’s that?”

  “The woman who pushed me. You said you know who she is? So tell me. I want to know why she did it. I want to know why she thought I deserved to die.”

  “Ah, that.” The odd-coloured woman turned the volume of the radio down and shrugged. “You don’t actually know her personally but she found out we were hiding you, somehow, and she figured pushing you off a building would be the best way to inform the Office of your existence.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Until the Office got to know about you, your grandmother had been the last person they knew of with a body like yours. After she died, all research on superhuman regeneration came to a standstill. It’s been over forty years since they last made progress so I guess the woman who pushed you decided it was high-time they got moving again.”

  “Wait, so you know her?”

  “No, I just know of her. I never met her but... I’ve been hearing a lot. Enough to know we should all be staying as far away from her as is humanly possible.”

  I frowned again. “Okay. And... who are you? How do I know I can trust you?”

  The odd-coloured woman laughed—a genuine, truly amused laugh. “I see you’re learning fast,” she
said with a sly grin once she was no longer laughing. “Lane, my name is Fleur. You can trust me because I was... how should I put it... I was your mother’s really good friend.” She smiled, slyly again.

  My eyebrows moved upwards. “Tell me everything.”

  About the Author

  Anna Ferrara is a mostly-closeted lesbian living in a mostly-conservative city where male homosexuality remains illegal and female homosexuals do not have legal rights. In early 2017, she decided to begin expressing the mostly-secret side of herself through fiction and published her first book, Snow White and Her Queen: The Untold Affair. The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange is her second book and the first in the Those Strange Women series. You can find out more about her life and work at annaferrarabooks.com.

  If you enjoyed this book and would like to express your support for the author, please do leave her a review on Goodreads.

  Other Books by Anna Ferrara

  The Woman Who Pretended To Love Men

  (Those Strange Women #2)

  In 1999, Fleur de Roller walked into a tea house in Hong Kong and introduced herself to Milla Milone, daughter of a New York mob boss. Sparks flew.

  Despite the obvious chemistry, Fleur repeatedly denies having any feelings for Milla because she has secrets—another identity and a job she can’t talk about—that might get her into big trouble if the possibly dangerous younger woman ever found out.

  Trouble comes anyway when the frustrated Milla moves on, starts dating other women, and leaves Fleur all by herself amidst a fervour of loss and wanting.

  Fleur has to decide if the career she worked so hard to establish is worth the lies she has to put on to get ahead or if the ‘alternative lifestyle’ she read so many negative things about is worth giving up her well-paying job for.

  She also has to decide if Milla is safe to love because Milla seems to be hiding a whole assortment of secrets of her own.

  The Woman Who Tried To Be Normal

  (Those Strange Women #3)

  In 1975, Helen Mendel married a widower and aircraft engineer, moved into his suburb in Los Angeles, 375 miles away from Area 51, and got herself merrily settled into a life of domestic bliss with nothing but her husband's pleasure on her mind.

  Ethel Ashlock, wife of her husband's colleague, a depressed alcoholic addicted to Valium with unfulfilled dreams of becoming a pilot, hates her on sight. She thinks Helen's just another boring, brain-washed housewife and doesn’t make any effort to hide how much she detests her.

  She doesn't realise Helen is not as commonplace as she appears; that she has synaesthesia—the ability to see sounds, hear images and taste feelings—and a past she's not telling anyone, not even her husband, about.

  Things change when Helen, having tolerated enough of Ethel's persistent hostility, lifts her veil of pretence. Ethel soon finds herself blackmailed, frightened, and also... irresistibly intrigued by her new neighbour.

  She becomes obsessed with getting Helen to like her and soon discovers they have more in common than she previously thought. Neither of them believe their husbands are truly aircraft engineers, for one, and neither of them believe Helen’s husband’s former wife, Violet, actually killed herself in the year before…

  Together, the two women work to uncover the truth about Violet’s sudden death, until they discover the truth, not out there, but closer than either of them ever thought possible…

  About the Those Strange Women series

  Those Strange Women is a series of six books about the lives of six ‘unusual’ women over nine decades. Amidst changing attitudes towards women and homosexuality, the women grow, adapt and find their own ways of existing in a world in which they don’t quite belong. A few of them learn to love but most learn to hate; a few of them fail to thrive but most survive and develop a taste for revenge.

  Snow White and Her Queen

  Before there was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was another story some preferred not to tell.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?”

  “You, my Queen, are fairest of all,” the Princess had said, unravelling a nightmare of obsession and forbidden desire.

  At an apple orchard in the dead of the night, Queen Katherine runs into her reclusive stepdaughter for the first time in 17 years. Surprised by her ravishing beauty and unconventional boldness, she pursues a friendship, only to find herself inescapably captivated by the Princess’ charm and wanting more.

  “The Princess is a thousand times fairer than me,” she concludes in an inexplainable fever of despair that shocks her servants as much as it does herself.

  But at a time when romance between women is unthinkable, the Queen has to put on all the pretence she can muster to keep her horrible secret from both her powerful husband and the smitten huntsman trying to win her heart.

  To make matters worse, seven peasants and a handsome Prince threaten to snatch the Princess’ affections and take her away from the castle for good.

  The Queen has to decide once and for all what to do about her strange feelings for the Princess, before she misses her chance.

  This intimate retelling of the popular Grimms’ fairy tale will change your understanding of the wicked Queen’s infamous jealousy forever.

  The Woman Who Pretended To Love Men

  (Sample)

  Chapter 1

  25 Jun 1999, Friday

  Milla and I first touched on a stormy evening in the last year of the twentieth century, inside a packed tea house in Hong Kong, amidst a flurry of inescapable noise and movement that was the inevitable result of too many people trying to co-exist in too small a space.

  I was just inches away from her face, shoved forward by the stream of waiters and dinner patrons trying to squeeze past me from behind, drenched below the knees, with hair and arms covered in droplets of rain, when I asked if I could share her two-seater table.

  “If you don’t mind?” I added, when she looked up at me with suspicion, even though there were zero empty tables around her, no other empty seats and a horde of umbrella-wielding locals right outside the tea house’s window. Normally, I wouldn’t even have asked—table-sharing was just the way dining worked in Hong Kong—but this wasn’t a normal situation.

  At the table next to hers, four gangster-like men had looked up from their bowls and were staring daggers at me. The message they were trying to send me was clear. Mess with her and you’re dead. Though I stood my ground, I made a big show of being polite—took my earphones out of my ear, adjusted the glasses on my nose to make sure they noticed I was the bookish sort—and made a mental note to leave if she did say ‘no’. It was, after all, the year Columbine happened, just two years after Hong Kong’s handover to China and months before the turn of the new millennium; I was decidedly aware that anything, even the most unexpected, could happen at any point.

  “Go ahead,” she said, after sizing me up with her large blue eyes for a good half second. To my relief, when she smiled, tucked one side of her long, dirty blonde hair behind her ear, and turned back to her bowl, the four gangster-like men dropped their glares and went back to eating too.

  “Thanks.”

  I took the seat opposite her, just seconds before a waiter dropped a plastic cup of pale brown tea in front of me and asked, in English, “You want English menu?”

  “No,” I said, in Cantonese, and promptly glanced at the hand-written Chinese words on the longish slips of paper pasted all over the walls and mirrors of the tea house. “I’ll have a French Toast and a Milk Tea, thanks.”

  He glanced up from the pad of paper he was scrawling on and regarded me with surprise. “You’re a Hong Konger?” he said in Cantonese. “Thought you were a foreigner, like your friend.”

  “No, I’m from here and she’s not my friend. I don’t know her.”

  “I see. In that case, I suggest you don’t piss her off.” He shot me a knowing look, right before he tore out the order chit he
had been scrawling on and stuffed it into the plastic cup next to the box of utensils at the edge of the table. In the blink of an eye, he was gone and screaming my order loudly enough for the entire tea house to hear. When I turned my eyes from him, I found Milla staring at me.

  She looked away the moment she saw me see her but I could tell from the slightly self-conscious way she looked at her noodles afterward that she had been watching me for a good while.

  “I just need dinner. That’s all,” I said to her in English as I grabbed a fork and knife from the box of utensils and rinsed them in the plastic cup of tea in front of me. I wanted to sound steady and nonchalant but my voice came out nervous nonetheless. “I’ll leave the moment I’m done,” I mumbled.

  She looked up at me, with eyes that appeared to be laughing, and shook her head slightly. “It’s fine. Don’t worry.”

  “Thanks.”

  Milla turned her eyes back on the soupy, springy ‘doll’ noodles she was having. I didn’t know what else to do with myself so I adjusted the leather satchel bag I had on my lap and looked all around.

  I looked past the tumult of human activity, at the colourful mosaic tiles all over the floor and walls, at the wooden and green-cushioned booths that gave the tea house its ‘70s vibe, at the haphazard placement of tables and chairs, at the cream cushioned chair I was seated on; I watched waiters in their bright yellow uniforms weaving through the congested space as quickly as their hips would take them, like their lives depended on it, and the diners in office attire, with oily faces and blank expressions, shovelling food into their mouths without stopping to reflect or comment on what they were tasting; I checked out the tattoos the four gangster-like men at the next table had over their bodies, at their black outfits and the way their hairstyles were either too long or too short to be considered decent... I looked everywhere and at everyone but her.